Recently, movie theaters in US suffer from reduction of visitors and increasingly introduce 3D (Three Dimension) video technology. This is intended to appeal an attractive feature specific to the movie theaters but not enjoyed in home theaters, and it is reported that the number of visitors has actually increased in the movie theaters that introduced the technology.
A method of utilizing binocular disparity is used, and videos for right-eye and left-eye are projected in a spatially divided or frequency-divided manner and are separated to left and right videos by special eyeglasses.
On the other hand, it is considered for future expansion to introduce the 3D video technology into consumer devices while maintaining compatibility with current DVD.
Patent Document 1 describes that left-eye and right-eye videos are recorded in an interleaved manner such that only the left-eye video is referenced from management information of existing DVD. Extended management information is added at the same time such that the videos for both eyes are referenced from the extended management information. This enables a smooth transition to 3D while maintaining the compatibility with existing DVD players.
Another feature of Patent Document 1 is that an arrangement exists for smoothly switching between a section provided with 3D video and a section only having 2D video. The primary point of this mechanism will be described using a video disc player 200 shown in FIG. 19.
The video disc player 200 is made up of an optical disc 210, a data acquiring portion 220, an AV (Audio Visual) reproducing portion 230, a left video output portion 240, a right video output portion 250, a switching portion 260, and a control portion 270.
The optical disc 210 basically has a DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) format subjected to the following expansions. As described above, a 3D video section has right-eye video and left-eye video recorded in an interleaved manner. The extended management information is also recorded along with stereoscopic video arrangement information for smoothly switching between 3D video and 2D video.
The data acquiring portion 220 reads AV stream and management information from the optical disc 210 in accordance with instructions from the control portion 270 and the AV reproducing portion 230.
The AV reproducing portion 230 decodes and outputs the read AV stream. The decoded video is output to the left video side (left-eye video side) of FIG. 19 in the case of 2D video and, the decoded video is output to both the left video side and the right video side (left-eye video side) in the case of 3D video.
The switching portion 260 switches and outputs left video output or right video output from the AV reproducing portion 230 to the right video output portion 250 in accordance with instruction from the control portion 270. This is for the purpose of supplying the right video output portion 250 with the left video output (left-eye output) in the case of 2D video since no right video output (right-eye output) exists.
The left video output portion 240 and the right video output portion 250 output the left-eye video and the right-eye video, respectively, to the outside.
The control portion 270 controls the switching portion 260 at the timing specified in advance by a content creator based on the stereoscopic video arrangement information read through the data acquiring portion 220, and thereby switches from the 2D video to the 3D video at appropriate timing.